Oh No! I’m a Self-Hating Jew!?! Mom, Tell Me They’re Lying!

Yesterday when I asked Brandeis troublemaker Lior Halperin whether she was Jewish, she said, “Yes. I’m what people call a self-hating Jew.” I said, “I love you, Lior. Me too.”

I’m not a good Jew. I’m probably a bad Jew. I don’t go to shul, don’t believe in the Old Testament God, married a Christian, (would have) raised my (nonexistent) kids Buddhist/nothing, and have tons of impure thoughts. Didn’t serve in the Israeli Army like Lior. But it’s my politics in particular that make me fishy. And truthfully, various good intelligent estimable highminded Jews say I’m a self-hating Jew; and maybe they know, and therefore maybe I am, and maybe I shouldn’t fight it. So, O.K., like, let’s move on, and in between crawling out from under my rock, and back to it, can I express my opinion?

This to me is one of the revelations of the Mearsheimer-Walt paper on the Israel lobby. These two profs in their 50s knew they’d get called anti-semites if they said what they believed, but they decided to go ahead and say it anyway. They didn’t care. They accepted the label, as the price of saying something important. Dershowitz says they destroyed their professional reputations by saying that, and Grant Smith (of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy) says Dershowitz is right, they did destroy their reputations, in certain quarters. But not in others.